'Yes—if she loved him,' said Trix, smiling. 'Confession and humiliation comfort women when they're in love. When they're not——' She shuddered. Presumably Barslett came into her mind.
'If he never told her at all, would that be fair?'
'She couldn't forgive that, if she found it out.'
'No?'
'Well, it would be very difficult.'
'But if she never found it out?'
'That would be the grandest triumph of all for her, perhaps,' said Trix very softly. For now, vague, undefined, ignorant still, but yet sure at its mark, had come the idea that somehow, for some reason, Airey Newton spoke not of Beaufort Chance, nor of another, not of some abstraction or some hypothetical man, but of his very self. 'My prayer to him would be not to tell me, and that I might never know on earth. If I knew ever, anywhere, then I should know too what God had let me do.'
'But if he never told you, and some day you found out?'
Trix looked across at him—at his dreary smile and his knitted brow. She amended the judgment she had given a minute before: 'We could cry together, or laugh together, or something, couldn't we?' she asked.
He came near her again and seemed to take a survey of her from the feather in her hat to the toe of her polished boot.